News Archive 2014

First ever Female President of the Royal Irish Academy

Thursday, 20 March, 2014

The Royal Irish Academy has elected its first female president in its 229-year history. UCD Professor Mary E. Daly will be the 55th president of Ireland’s leading academic institution and will take up the three-year post immediately.

Professor Daly is one of Ireland’s most prominent senior historians and is a member of the government’s Expert Advisory Group on Commemorations.

Professor Daly was involved in the commemoration of the sesquicentenary of the great famine 1995-97, and with Dr Margaret O’Callaghan she directed a research project on the Golden Jubilee of the 1916 Rising, resulting in the publication of a major edited work: 1916 in 1966: commemorating the Easter Rising (2007).

Over the course of her distinguished career, Professor Daly has researched widely and published prolifically, notably: Dublin, the Deposed Capital: A Social and Economic History, 1860-1914 (1984); Women and Work in Ireland (1997); The Slow Failure: Population Decline and Independent Ireland, 1920-1973 (2006); and, with Theo Hoppen, Gladstone: Ireland and Beyond (2011).

Professor Daly said that she is looking forward to taking up her new role in the Academy. ‘It is a place of great ideas and energy’.

Other scholars who have held the position of President of the Royal Irish Academy include: Eoin MacNeill (1940-3), T.K. Whittaker (1985-7) and James Dooge (1987-90).